MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2014

Alex Clark Likes Listening To Annette Bening’s Laugh

Two Shia LaBeouf Collaborators On The Skywriting Plagiarist’s Alleged Rape During His Performance Art

SW7 Trailer Recast As Lego

Lower Revenues But Higher Profits Predicted For Australian Cinemas 

Critical Elder David Thomson Cites Stanley Kauffman, Trashes Manny Farber And Sighs That The Newly-Restored Hiroshima Mon Amour Is “On Its Way To Being Forgotten”

“We never used the word puppetry, we never used the word robot. “
Bill Irwin Talks Some More About Miming The Kit-Kat Robot In Interstellar

“Entering as a blank slate allowed the craziness that comes with 15 relentless hours of Nolan world-layering and time-shifting to wash over me unimpeded, but it also meant I’d have about six minutes between screenings to consider how I felt about the movie, like a normal person.”
Robert Mays Consumes The All-You-Can-Eat Interstellar Pass

NY Times

“Mr. Rogen, who helped direct The Interview and has a writing credit on its script, has seized the country’s displeasure as a publicity tool.”
Michael Cieply Redefines Co-Writer-Co-Director-Co-Producer Seth Rogen’s Latest Comedy

Remembering The Late, Great Production Designer Anton Furst, The Man Who Built Gotham, 25 Years After Batman

variety

Sony Computer Hack Appears To Include Leak Of Awards-Season Screeners

NY Times

Frank Yablans, 79, Headed Paramount In Its 1970s Heyday, Then Became Ventureseome Indie Producer

“Being homeless is better than working for Amazon”

NY Times

“Netflix is the one that everybody speaks about, but there are lots and lots and lots and lots of others. New streaming services are launching every week.”
NYT Only Appears To Search For Flaws In Netflix’s Perceived Armor, Including $90 Spend For Weinstein’s “Marco Polo” Ten-Parter

WashPost Profiles Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, Doesn’t Even Blush From Its Heights Of Praise

With The Interview In The Offing, Sony Pictures Hack Could Be The Handiwork Of North Korean Absolute Leader Kim Jong-Un

Sight & Sound Crix Top-Ten Linklater, Godard, Zvyagintsev, Costa, Glazer, Anderson, Ceylan, Slaboshpytski, Pawlikowski, Alonso

Cahiers Du Cinema Crix Top-Ten Dumont, Godard, Glazer, Cronenberg, Miyazaki, Trier, Dolan, Sachs, Cavalier, Hong

Max Nelson On James Harvey On Star Presence

“There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug addicts. All the artists I have respected the most have also wallowed in all sorts of mind-expanding drugs.”
In First Interview Since Hitler Remarks, Lars Von Trier Claims He’s Quit Drugs And Alcohol; Sez “Shitty Films” Are In The Offing

nymag

Alice Hines On How Mike Nichols’ Working Girl Holds Up

Maclean’s Magazine Says After CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, Canada Will Change How It Treats Sexual Assault

Matt Singer Offers His Five Surefire Steps To An Award-worthy Biopic

NPR Takes A Gander At The Foot Technology Of Mae West’s Shoes

variety

“What Exodus could learn from Noah, Lincoln and Jeffrey Katzenberg”

NY Times

Restoring Alan Turing’s Estate

It’s Ten Years For The 20,000-Film Chicago Film Archives

“When he intoned: ‘There has been an awakening,’ I began to weep like Malakili the Rancor Keeper. It was a fast 88 seconds.”
Jordan Hoffman Circles Regal’s Union Square 14 And The Tease For SW:TFA

Ryan Gilbey On 50 Years Of The Mockumentary

NY Times

A. O. Scott Assembles Voices Considers Whether Art Is Failing Us In Hard Times

variety

Next Wave Of Brutal Fiscal Contraction At BBC: $630 Million By 2017

“To have a star just arbitrarily toss out draft after draft and force his staff to write around the clock for seven months is unfair and highly disrespectful.”
TV Writer Ken Levine On The Cosby Work Ethic

How The Nagra Recorder Changed Film Sound

On The Floor Of The AFM In Search Of Future Schlock

indie wire

Godard’s Goodbye To Language Gets 3D Playdates In Santa Monica, Chicago, Seattle

variety

“I miss a friend. I’d go to him even when he was doing his recovery, and I’d say, ‘-— the chemo, have a vodka martini,’ and he and I would go out.”
Scott Foundas Has A Brief Audience To Cover-Story Ridley Scott About Exodus, Nonstop Work, Why Movies Have To Have Stars For Finance, And Tony Scott

Seven Lessons In Creativity From The Director Of The Imitation Game
And – How Designers Recreated Alan Turing’s Machine

LA Times

Talking Babadook
“I always saw it as a love story between a mother and a child.”
And – “It takes a lot to make a film that comes from yourself.”

Martin Scorsese On The Experimental Editing Of The Last Waltz with vid

daily beast

Muckraker Mark Ebner Says, “I Warned You About Bill Cosby In 2007”

Excerpting Scott Saul‘s “Becoming Richard Pryor”

variety

“We’re not making The Godfather, we’re not making Chinatown. These films are not enough to get people out of their homes. That absence is now being taken care of by longform TV drama.”
Paul Schrader Packs His Informed Pessimism To Argentina

NY Times

“No matter how disruptive or innovative your business is, there are still ethical values that are fundamental that businesses have to pay attention to. All business relies on some sense of ethics because that’s what differentiates it from plain old crime.”
Nick Bilton On “The Slippery Slope Of Silicon Valley”

Picturing The Quilt Art Of Wisconsin Film Critic-Turned-Artist Kent Williams

“Why does CG from Jurassic Park still hold up?”

Eager Anne Hornaday Offers Her 2014 Top 10

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“I don’t think it’s cruel to say this, because John himself would undoubtedly have turned it into a gleeful anecdote: When he had the stroke that killed him, he was at a local dinner theater. Hell of a review.”

“I am inclined to aver that every activity needs its critics, from narcissists bloviating in Washington to exhibitors of knee holes in their blue jeans by way of following a fad. So, too, tennis players and others wearing their caps backward. There is, to be sure, only fairly innocuous folly in puncturing pants or reversing caps, but for political or artistic or religious twisting of thought or harboring holes in the head there is rather less excuse. I have always inveighed against the bleary journalism practiced by newspaper reviewers, as opposed to the real criticism performed by, well, critics.”

“I often felt a twinge of grief at the idea that John Simon had devoted his life to a method of work that could only make him increasingly unhappy. Here was a man, elegant, articulate, and vastly knowledgeable, fluent in at least half a dozen languages, whose gifts of mind gave nothing back to the arts he wrote about except a few unkind remarks that made fun of someone’s performance, ethnicity, physical attributes, or, with a pun, on his target’s name. (“If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon folly.”) Other theatre critics keep such darts in their rucksacks for occasional use; John lived by them.”

“One person’s critic is another person’s crackpot. That they are not united in their opinions is ascribable to the Latin saying: quot homines, tot sententiae. I myself prefer being considered a creep, but that is what you get for having what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘Strong Opinions.’ It is odd that in a country so wallowing in negativity, starting with mass shootings and climaxing with Trump, such an unimportant matter as theater criticism should generate so much hostility. The only target patently more important is lead in the drinking water.”

The DVD Wrapup: Cold War, Betty Blue, Official Secrets, Demons, Olivia, American Dreamer, Land of Yik Yak

E. Scott Weinberg On Youthful Fangoria Encounters

Rome Bookstore Closes

With a Grauniad-Alleged $300 Million Budget, Could The Yet-Unseen But Surely Weird Cats Pass A Billion Dollars at The Box Office?

WEEKEND READS ON MEDIAQUAKE

Tribune Trolley Problem

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon